Yuen Po Street Bird Garden

I had just made a comment to my husband that since moving to Hong Kong, I miss the sounds of birds chirping (a small consequence of living in a huge city I suppose). Well never fear, I found the chirping birds today and my longing for these feather friends has subsided for now.
A great stop in your day if you are in the area and buzzing around the local flower market or live fish district in the area. Fresh air, beautiful trees and of course, birds. Lots and lots of birds.
Yuen Po Street Bird Garden, which is a large Chinese-​style bird park filled with thousands of birds, bird traders and bird fanciers sharing their love of birds. Birds, crickets, worms, cages, food, water bowls… everything you could possibly imagine you need pertaining to having a bird as a pet can be found at this garden.
There are locals who have brought their own birds and are just hanging out with neighbors and other bird fanciers. The park itself is beautiful and was a preservation project of sorts for the city in cleaning up and revitalizing this area countless years ago, as I have read. There is a brochure I found there talking more about the design and history of the Bird Street Garden.
Maybe not on the Top 20 List for a tourist visiting Hong Kong for the first time, but definately a neat little spot to see showing local flavor and a worthy stop if you are discovering more about Mong Kok… or you miss the sounds of chirping birds.

Ok, but what is a bird garden, you might be asking? Well here we go, whee… up the street and under that big arch into the middle of it, to find out what it is.
l supposed it would be a place where people go to air their birds and share an afternoon in the park. It sort of is. What I wasn’t expecting was that it is also a bird market. There were tons of the little cuties, crammed into tiny cages :(
In case you want some live feed, you can find that here too. Several stalls near the entrance were crammed with bags and bags of big bouncing bugs. (How’s that for alliteration?) Lots of crickets and grasshoppers, of course, as well as meal-​worms and a few other things. The bugs themselves I found cute too. So does that mean that the birds are extra cute because you are what you eat?
So many birds! Finches, lovebirds, sparrows, parrots, macaws, parakeets, cockatiels, and plenty of others with names I don’t know. These rainbow lovebirds were particularly cute.
There were few big birds, but the two I saw, a Scarlet and a Blue-​And-​Yellow Macaw, were pretty cool. They were still as statues but clearly alive as signified by the occasional blink. They looked quite healthy from what I could tell. It was nice to be close to a big bird like that; it doesn’t happen often in my life, at least.
There were lots of other interesting things to look at, like the walls of cages in all sorts of sizes, some occupied and some not, or the many flutterings going on wherever I looked. The noise, I must say, took some getting used to. It was quite loud and some of the birds were letting out high pitched squawks and cries that were so shrill they verged on hurting my ears. Still, some locations were quieter than others so it was possible to move on if the sound became grating. And despite all that, it’s worth a visit.

Be alarmed. This is the place you will see quite a number of elderly men feeding and showcasing their birds in public. (I hope that does not come out wrong). In fact, it is one of the age old Chinese tradition where old men bring along their feathered friends in a nicely craft bamboo cage or carved from teak and hear them sing.
This place is called Yuen Po Street, as known as Bird Garden, which is famous for selling pet birds. Every day it has a handful of tourists and the like coming here to witness how men feed their pets with crickets, grasshoppers or caterpillars in exchange for songs. If you walk further down the street, you will see some market stands where you can buy different kind of birds like canaries, toucans or parrots.
Some may see this kind of cruel to confine one flying creature in such small cage (apparently SCMP tried to end by running a campaign this one time but I guess it failed) but honestly I do not know how it started if you ask me… Chinese seem to traditionally have grown to keep birds as their pets… but I have to admit sometimes it is nice to have a serene environment where you can just relax and stop working for a bit and listen to birdsongs. My advice is to adopt an open heart and treat it as a foreign culture that preserves the characteristics. Sadly (or fortunately… I have mixed feelings about this place), I do not see this place existing in a few more years because of the dwelling number of tourists.